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Sovereign (The Shardlake series, 3)

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Matthew Shardlake is given a task by Thomas Cranmer that requires him to join the King's Progress at York and provide legal advice to the people of the city, and also something far more political and dangerous.

Obvia decir que ninguna de las dos tareas serán sencillas para Shardlake, de hecho su vida correrá peligro en más de una ocasión y llegará a ganarse la enemistad de gente poderosa que le harán la vida imposible debido a su rectitud. Others, however, believe that Johnson negotiated in bad faith throughout. In other words – given that the bulk of those who have supported him throughout his career, and ultimately helped him to become prime minister, were insistent on the purest form of Brexit – he was always going to go to wherever the Sovereign Individuals wanted him to. I did not have to agree with its essential philosophy to recognise that the book is the product of large brainpower, sweeping far and wide in historical research and analysis. Its strength, however, especially reading it today, lies in the force of its predictions about the new millennium that was to dawn three years later.

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The tragedy is that fundamentalism is not interested in the real problems of real people outside the charmed circle of believers, and is frequently quite happy to envisage those outside the circle being brutally destroyed, as is the case with the “End-timers” in modern Protestant fundamentalism. Islamic terrorism goes a (very large) step further, actively destroying people identified as enemies and heretics. Both groups, however, believe that the world is divided between those who have true doctrine and those who do not, and the latter do not matter except so far as some may be converted. That’s my take.

The character of Matthew Shardlake is so skillfully developed that I have to remind myself that he is a fictional character. With his placement as legal council just lowly enough that the reader gets a view of common people and just high enough that he is called upon by Archbishop Cranmer, Shardlake finds himself swept up in intrigue between northern rebels and the tyrannical Henry VIII. But the murder of a local glazier involves Shardlake in deeper mysteries, connected not only to the prisoner in York Castle but to the royal family itself. And when Shardlake and Barak stumble upon a cache of secret papers which could threaten the Tudor throne, a chain of events unfolds that will lead to Shardlake facing the most terrifying fate of the age . . . I have to confess to being a dedicated Henry hater. It dismays me that recent history has lionised him as some sort of humanist Renaissance Man, and/or as a stud in the bedroom. Personally, I loathe not just him but the entire Tudor dynasty because they had so much blood on their hands. In my eyes, Henry is a cold-blooded killer, although he may never have wielded the murder weapon himself. There is an old saying "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", and that definitely applies to Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth I. All in the name of religion, but really to fulfil their own greedy ambitions and craving for supremacy.

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Like I did with Dark Fire, I listened to portions of this via the audiobook. The audiobooks for this series are really well narrated and I loved that the narrator puts on different accents. It was nice hearing a Yorkshire/Northern accent and reminded me of home, as I was born in Yorkshire. Even in the physical copy of the book the accent came through in the way the words were written. So props to the author.

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